What is Open Access?

Open Access provides free and unrestricted access to qualified scientific publications in the public internet and guarantees long-term archiving. Publishing according to the open access model guarantees the authors the right to retain copyright to their works, and from faster publication and lower production and distribution cost, it allows wider accessibility and greater citation impact through world wide access.

Open Access is not self-publishing, nor a way to bypass peer-review and publication, nor is it a kind of second-class, cut-price publishing route. It is simply a means to make research results freely available online to the whole research community.

Open Access can be reached in two different ways:

The green road refers to the self-archiving of digital documents in an openly accessible institutional or subject-based server either in parallel with or after publication in a toll-access journal.

The golden road refers to the primary publication of scholarly and scientific articles in Open Access journals.